We’ve all heard arguments about whether or not there’s a liberal bias in the U.S. media. Politics aside, I think the one truth most of us could agree on is that there’s a media bias toward stories that generate readers (and stories that are easy to file, which is where good PR comes in). At Biz360, we wanted to know how European media coverage of U.S. presidential candidates compares to U.S. coverage and discovered that not only do Democrats get more coverage at home, but the top Democrats appear in 10 percent more of total candidate coverage in Europe.

The following charts show European and U.S. media coverage, respectively, for U.S. presidential candidates and hopefuls over the past 30 days.

Our Secret Ingredient

I was working on another business when I received a call from Brad Brodigan, CEO of Biz360. I worked with Brad in the past and have a great deal of respect for him professionally and personally. So when he shared the story of Biz360 with me and the ambitious vision for the company, I listened intently. He described the company’s growing market opportunity, innovative technology, blue chip client list, talented team of employees, solid financial support and commitment to expansion. These details certainly made me pause. Biz360, he explained, is a company with a strong foundation and tremendous growth potential.

Having worked together before, Brad was familiar with my background. He knew that this is exactly the kind of business I would be charged up about. With over 25 years of marketing and management experience, I’ve directed marketing initiatives for a range of respected and innovative companies. This experience includes the successful launch of two start-up companies and the IPO’s of three “the types of business challenges that excite and motivate me like no other.

Several conversations and meetings later, I agreed to join the Biz360 team. I am focusing on both growing our core business and the aggressive expansion of new products. Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing more details about the company’s product development initiatives of which many of you are already involved.

After my first week as CMO, I am thrilled to be here and eager to help grow Biz360 into one of the world’s great and enduring companies. I am certain we will get there. Building for the future takes real effort and focus. We have superior technology and a great business model. And I am already impressed by the people here — your level of talent, energy, team spirit, commitment and enthusiasm. I know that people make the difference between achieving greatness and mediocrity. With you, I believe we have what it takes. You are our secret ingredient.

We are focused, nimble and entrepreneurial. In my mind, it is the perfect start to building the great and enduring company we envision. Thanks for welcoming me to Biz360. I look forward to working with all of you.

If you haven’t read PRWeek’s annual measurement feature (reg req’d) by Erica Iacono, it’s worth checking out. She talks about the movement of PR toward embracing social media measurement and integrating it with traditional media measurement. She also emphasizes a growing understanding that market influencers could be journalists, analysts, bloggers or some combination of those things.The article also features a profile on Sun Microsystems, a Biz360 client. It outlines their integrated measurement strategy that includes domestic, global and social media analysis. This approach to understanding their market has lead to a change in the way they announce products:

Working with Biz360, the company has segmented the top 300 bloggers that it considers to be individuals that can ‘move the market.’ Sun tracks them on a monthly basis as far as what announcements they pick up and what issues are important to them.

This measurement strategy has impacted the company’s outreach to the community. When it came time to announce the launch of Solaris, a new operating system on the Open Source platform, the PR team made the decision to launch it into the blogosphere first.

Erica also references the biggest measurement story from last year, which focused on how P&G had discovered through market mix modeling (MMM) that PR had the highest ROI among the marketing disciplines in four out of the six brands it tested. David Rockland of Ketchum predicts that MMM will soon be the standard for measuring “quick sale, non-durable consumer goods.”

With increasingly sophisticated measurement and budgets on the rise, I think we’ll be hearing more about placing PR results in a larger business context.

As I get ready to begin my role as CEO of Biz360 tomorrow, I reflect back on my decision to leave a leadership role with a very successful business enterprise and move my wife and two young daughters more than halfway across the country away from our friends and family. Really, it was an easy decision for us to make.

I am fortunate to have spent time working with many different world-class organizations. My career consists of more than 15 years of building successful sales and marketing organizations for both small and large companies. Much of my career has been spent with technology-based organizations. As a Partner in the Management Consulting Division of The Gallup Organization, I helped executives use scientific research to develop business strategies for engaging their employees and customers.

As I learned more and more about Biz360, I realized the tremendous market opportunity facing the company. With the increasing levels of media coverage and explosion of social media on the Internet, even the most advanced companies are struggling to measure and manage the fast pace of changing perceptions in today’s digital society. Biz360 has been and will continue to be a leader in developing innovative technology to measure and interpret market perception.

The company has the talent and the technology to deliver the full service offerings our most demanding clients require. From real-time insight to analyst services, Biz360 has the foundation to lead the way for years to come.

On a personal note, my wife and our two young daughters will be joining me in the Bay Area in November. After meeting the people at Biz360 and studying the business opportunity, we knew this was the right move for us. Personally, we love the outdoors and welcome the chance to live in a great place like the Bay Area. It’s an easy decision to make this level of commitment when you feel so confident about the opportunity.

You can expect great things to come from Biz360. And I look forward to your thoughts along the way.

How many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand? A trick question you say…

McDonald’s has built one of the world’s most durable brands around efficient, consistent and low-cost food. People save time and money going to McDonald’s - and they know what to expect from the experience. Of course, four men robbed a McDonald’s in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, last Saturday by gunpoint providing an experience far beyond expectations. At other locations, you might have a McDrug Deal, get carjacked in the parking lot and or shot on your way home. The security at a high school in Philadelphia can monitor the McDonald’s across the street. Why? Because you might be shot at McDonald’s for showing disrespect (this one happened in London, so it’s not just us, but it may be Western culture’s own brand of extremism).

It’s not just in the news. Bloggers are talking about these things. So much, in fact, that blog posts on crime at McDonald’s outweighs conversations about its breakfast menu (there is some overlap though, like this blog post talking about someone who was run down in a McDonald’s parking lot after eating breakfast there).

Share of Key Issues and Messages for McDonald’s
3 Months of Blog Postings

And while analyzing the Blogosphere is a great way to get a sense of public discourse, there’s nothing better than good old-fashioned news media to pinpoint where the problem areas are (this may change soon, if geotagging takes off).

Top Publications Covering McDonald’s and Crime
3 Months of Media Coverage

But don’t expect local issues like crime to stay local. A local news attack at a Grand Prairie, Texas, McDonald’s was posted to You Tube where it was viewed 3,685 times in the four months between when it was posted (8/2/06) and when I checked it today. And it doesn’t stop there. Bloggers, like Dread Egos, post the You Tube video to their blog. A Google search for “McDonald’s” and “sucker punch” turns up 32,600 results. That’s not many compared to the 16,900,00 results that come up for McDonald’s, but “McDonald’s” and “crime” turns up 1,750,000 results (NOTE: the actual search results for McDonald’s, the company, would be less than a pure “McDonald’s” search and the content having to do with crime would be greater than the results from a simple “crime” keyword search).

Since McDonald’s is everywhere and crime is everywhere, you have to expect this is going to happen from time to time. But, is there any brand impact? And what could McDonald’s do about it? Knowing that it’s a topic of discussion greater than many of the products and messages being promoted is a big red flag that you might need to take action. Using local PR strategies to balance out negative perception is a good start, but in world connected by social media, that’s not enough. In the absence of a full-fledged corporate strategy to minimize crime at the stores, going beyond messaging to show some level of action is always ideal (in-store metal detector perhaps, remove shoes, toss liquids…).

I looked for some research on this topic and found a great article on the impact of corporate crimes, but not on the occurance of crimes during the brand experience. I’d like to conduct a study to find out what percentage of people who have experienced a crime at McDonald’s first hand will no longer eat there. Then ask the same question to people who heard about a crime from someone else? What’s the fall-off rate as you add more degrees of separation. You would have to take into account the number of times someone has heard about a crime, over what period of time and whether the negative impact was per location or at the brand level.

Ultimately, you could figure out the ripple effect of each crime and how many it would take to significantly impact McDonald’s brand. Then you could answer the question - how many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand?

We held our 3rd Engineering Hack Day here yesterday and, as usual, I can’t wait for the demonstration session this afternoon. For us, hack days are opportunities for all developers to suspend their normal work and devote time to projects of their choice that:

1. Are relevant to Biz360
2. Can be prototyped in 24 hours
3. Would be fun to implement

Biz360 has a long history of innovation, and many of our key product features were initiated through these kinds of prototypes. So, after reading about the experiences of two other Silicon Valley companies, we decided to formalize our own hack days.

In prior hack day events, our engineers have come up with Ajax-based enhancements for richer user experiences in Market360, search/discovery mashups for ad hoc analysis, real-time system monitoring visualizations, and several other interesting projects. Several of these developments were selected for further refinement, and are now in the hands of our customers.

I was fortunate to be able to attend Yahoo’s open hack day a week and a half ago, which was also a great experience. The basic idea is the same—developers building and demonstrating working prototypes in 24 hours—but on a completely different scale. At Biz360, we listen to iTunes; at Yahoo, they brought in Beck. At Biz360, we pick up a few sandwiches; at Yahoo, they brought in hundreds of pizzas and Krispy Kremes. At Biz360, the best hack earns a gold-painted hacksaw; at Yahoo, they gave away a 32″ LCD TV.

So far, there has been no shortage of hack day project ideas, because our technology involves text analysis, real-time reporting, grid computing, and content acquisition … with scalability requirements throughout. In fact, I believe that the fact that we offer so many interesting technical challenges is one of the major reasons why we’re able to recruit and retain top-notch engineering talent here at Biz360.

The Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave that we mentioned last month was published today and is now available for purchase. The Biz360 summary is available here. It’s the deepest dive into our space to date, and we’re hopeful that the increased attention will benefit the industry as a whole, especially those of us who were selected for the review.

Overall, analyst Peter Kim rated Biz360 as a “Strong Performer.” From the executive summary:

The vendor offers a strong, end-user-focused brand monitoring solution with good coverage of data sources. The company’s Market360 product features a powerful and flexible user interface with broad reporting capabilities. Biz360’s presence in analytic and consulting services is small but growing, making the solution a better fit for companies that seek a self-service tool.

The report includes more detail regarding our flagship product, Market360:

Biz360’s user interface provided the most in-depth functionality for client-side use. The ability to construct queries, reports, and alerts, as well as tuning and filtering sources and speaker sentiment, are provided in a user-friendly Ajax-based interface. However, empowerment comes with a downside: Some clients report that the system’s complexity makes it easy to miss some of the functions that are available for use.

The complexity criticism is fair, and one that we’ve heard from some of our users in the past. In an effort to help our clients to realize as much value as possible from the application, we just conducted an extensive round of customer feedback interviews. Based on this feedback, further usability enhancements are in the works. Here’s what we currently do to help users on this front:

• Build customizable dashboards that can incorporate all of the reports our customers need on a single home page.
• Offer alternate delivery options, including periodic email, email alerts, offline reports, and RSS.
• Provide personal assistance through our account services and technical services teams.

The Forrester report also evaluated our services capabilities:

The vendor offers training opportunities on par with other vendors. Biz360 is building consulting services capabilities, but these services are still nascent.

On this point, we respectfully disagree. Our consulting services team is small, true, but it consistently generates very high rates of satisfaction and loyalty among our current customers. Our services strategy involves not only building a top-notch internal staff, but also partnering with external consultants for targeted strategic engagements. Combining the power of our application with the insight of expert media analysts has led to some of our most compellling client success stories.

A couple of our competitors secured higher overall ratings in the study. Congratulations to Cymfony’s Jim Nail and Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Pete Blackshaw, both of whom are recognized as industry thought leaders. We can thank them for leading effective marketing campaigns which have increased awareness for this space. With our own brand and thought initiatives like MarketIQ and key executive positions filled, we plan to be in the leader category when the next brand monitoring wave rolls around in 12-18 months.

We’re launching MarketIQ today to fill a gap we’ve been seeing in marketing blogs. We find plenty of surveys, stats and commentary on the changing media landscape and its impact on marketers. What we see less often are data-driven examples of the changes taking place.

We’ll contribute to the conversation primarily through market analysis on current events, work that we’ve done with our clients, and other interesting examples we run across. From these discussions, we hope that strategies for leveraging social media and new perspectives on age-old marketing issues will emerge.

That said, we won’t be able to resist sharing interesting research, our own commentary or the occasional update on our company, so expect some of those posts as well.

As our founder, You Mon Tsang, always says – we’re helping marketers balance the art with science. We’ll supply the science and our perspective. We’re hoping you’ll bring the art. After all, it’s how you interpret and use intelligence that makes all the difference (just look at the ongoing political debate over U.S. intelligence for a great example of this subjectivity).

A little bit about me… my name is Brian Glover and I’ve been with Biz360 for four years (which is at least 12 in start-up years). I’ve worn many hats, from PR to product marketing, and have been focused most recently on our blog analysis offering. Before I came to Biz360, I worked in the PR department at Documentum (now part of EMC) where I was a Biz360 client. Before that, I spent two months making pizza and cinnamon buns on Whistler Mountain in Canada while living as a victim of the dot com bust (a story for another time).

In the spirit of openness, I’d like to start off addressing a question we’re sure to get – why are we just now launching our blog? I’d like to say we’ve been too busy researching blogs, building great blog analysis technology and developing services to show our clients the impact of new and traditional media on their business (that wouldn’t be completely far-fetched), but the reality is there isn’t a good enough reason for not starting sooner. As a new participant, we look forward to your feedback along the way.